Astral ward mage armor set should absolutely not be grindy

[Zera.9435]

On 9/21/2023 at 5:57 AM, Wielder Of Magic.3950 said:

Casuals wanted an armor that would not cost a lot of time, skill, materials, gold or grind.

No. That's just plain wrong. What we wanted was content on the level of things like Prismatic Champion's Regalia, Vision, and Aurora. You know, something that has us going to various parts of the open world, doing a variety of events and collections, and kept us engaged in actual gameplay. Instead, the largest time/material sink is the monotonous rift farm that you can really only do efficiently in one map.

But I digress, the author is talking solely about the exotic armor that you have to get just to unlock the ability to start working on the legendary armor, and specifically mentions that an exotic level equipment that is not even a precursor armor should not require legendary materials to acquire. That's what they were saying.

[Linken.6345]

7 hours ago, Zera.9435 said:

No. That's just plain wrong. What we wanted was content on the level of things like Prismatic Champion's Regalia, Vision, and Aurora

And thats not what the guy said?

Seems like it to me especialy if you want it like the champion's regalia.

Just out of curiosity what did you have to do in core tyria for vision or aurora?

Did you have to do anything in season 3 for vision?

No you did not so why should you have to for the new armor tied to Soto?

It is nice they expanded rifts so you can do it  all over the world and more maps added later Im sure but it could just as easily just have been the 2/3 Soto maps and that would have been a real grind as people call this we have now.

Edited September 22, 2023 by Linken.6345

[Donari.5237]

9 hours ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

We know what ANet has told us, which is precious little and subject to change without notice.

The wiki says it's "a required part of the path towards the legendary Obsidian armor" so fine, it's a precursor...or at least it's planned to be. But ask yourself this: given their history to date, what reason is there to believe anything ANet says? This is the part that gets me about these legendary gear threads (armor, runes, whatev). It doesn't even exist yet, but people are (for some reason) trusting that ANet has been truthful and forthcoming about what's required, when this release has been nothing but one failure to communicate after another. They're been secretive and obscure about the whole thing, so to speak.

I'm not getting on a deliberately boring hamster wheel and running like mad for the Promise of Future Reward(TM), which is currently all this amounts to. Yes, the exotic set exists now and it's not a bad skin on its own, but without knowing what the end-result legendary is, I refuse to grind for a mere exotic set with an ascended+ price tag just because it's allegedly the precursor for an as-yet-nonexistent legendary reward.

Until it's actually released as part of the live game, it's nothing more than vaporware.

It's totally fair to wait and see, but we do have some indications already in game that the Astral Ward Armor is needed.  Lyhr gives a legendary shopping list which includes the completion of the collection for each piece.  If you look in the Legendary Armor part of the achieves panel you will see that each piece needs the corresponding Rift Hunter and Astral Ward pieces unlocked, along with two more things that are just ? right now.  What isn't clear is if we will need to actively craft all 18 pieces.  I've made the six heavy ones since I want to start with the heavy legendary armor.  This unlocked all 18 pieces in Wardrobe and in Legendary Armor Collection credit, so I'm hoping I won't have to craft the other twelve and I certainly won't commit the resources to it until we see what's involved in the next release.  It helps that I really did want the skins.

I understand you're unsure the legendary armor will even come out or look anything like the concept art.  To the first point, I think it's pretty safe to say it will come out and will provide the mechanical benefits of legendary armor.  They have achieves set up for it.  To the second, indeed, in-game implementations are usually clunkier in shape and less fluid in physics than the concept.  Plus there may be animations that some people don't care for.  So if your only interest is in the skin it makes every bit of sense to hold off until you know what it's really like.  Maybe accrue mats for it that have other uses so if you choose to make the armor you're not months behind and if you choose not to then you have a lot of useful mats for other projects.  I don't have any legendary armor because I have not found the methods of getting it fun.  So far I'm enjoying casually playing the new content and seeing progress (I just finished those six pieces in the last couple of days; I've made a new alt to be a wizard wearing the new look and am about to take her gathering hp to become a Spellbreaker).

Making the six pieces didn't feel grindy to me since all the stuff I needed for it was either showering on me just from doing metas and rifts when I felt like doing them, and I had most of the stuff for the Gifts built up already.  I was only slowed down by working on the new skyscale skin which siphoned off the essences, which is why it took me until now to make the armor.  Making the other twelve ... yep, I'd call that an annoying grind since there wouldn't be any skin unlocks or other progress to be seen, and the unlocks in the achieve panel has raised plausible hope that I don't have to make those so it'd be disheartening to have that hope dashed.

[Teknomancer.4895]

2 hours ago, Donari.5237 said:

I think it's pretty safe to say it will come out and will provide the mechanical benefits of legendary armor.  They have achieves set up for it.  To the second, indeed, in-game implementations are usually clunkier in shape and less fluid in physics than the concept.  Plus there may be animations that some people don't care for.  So if your only interest is in the skin it makes every bit of sense to hold off until you know what it's really like.  Maybe accrue mats for it that have other uses so if you choose to make the armor you're not months behind and if you choose not to then you have a lot of useful mats for other projects. 

Honestly I'm not interested in animations or elaborate skins, most of the time I wish I could turn off other-player particle effects, wings etc in my field of vision so I can actually see what's happening! 🤣

My primary interest in legendary armor would be purely from a functional standpoint. I'd probably only be making Light armor for my mains, but I only really like the concept art for the Medium so the skin would likely get transmuted. I'm just not feeling the "overdone Lord Faren cosplay" vibe the light armor concept art gives me. 🤷‍♂️

The appearance matters, but I guess what I meant by not knowing what it's like referred more to the cost and means of acquisition, as well as the when and the how long does it take. We don't know for sure, they're not talking, and they've already been really bad on communication with this release. Months and months more full of rifts, rifts and more rifts while NPC's randomly yell at my general direction from the other side of the map and other NPCs whisper the same lines at me over and over again like some demonic verbal tic? That's a hard pass from me, thanks anyway. Some kind of justification for the exotic set to be such a huge outlier on cost when compared to any other exo set in the game might be nice, too. Right now it's all sticker shock with little-to-no functional value, which is a really poor sales pitch.

You have a point about just stockpiling the mats which is more or less what I've done with the expansion zone rewards, but tbh once I finished the story I lost interest and moved on to other things. Maybe I'll go back to it after they do a bug and balance patch or three, otherwise I'll likely just wait until the next episode when we will hopefully have more and better information.

[InvaGir.9158]

On 9/22/2023 at 12:22 AM, Stx.4857 said:

Why does every armor skin need to be easy to get?  If you are just interested in the astral ward armor for the skins, it won’t take very long to get.  Less than a month surely.  

There's nothing hard by grinding the same content repeatedly

Do not mistake a challenge with grind, those are not the same things

Lets compare different types of grinds too

Legendary weapon collection grinds = Fun

Those let you do different thing and direct you to different objectives, they have a story behind each item just as well

Generally speaking every collection is not too bad and doesn't seem to get too many complaints

Had they put the astral ward "skins" set behind a collection I personally wouldn't make this thread

Rift hunting grind = Not very fun

Basically its pull your magic stone, let it direct you to some place a rift is located it in and fly towards it with your skyscale or use a waypoint if you are lucky

Its a repeatable objective that doesn't change and the rewards each rift yields is a disgrace to to the entire loot system(that is already bad) which makes it even worse and more grindy

And yes there is a mastery to do that but to get that you need to grind even more, grind for the sake of grind and do the same events in the world to farm that miserable XP bar that doesn't move because the astral ward mastery branch while having 4 abilities requires a ton of XP for every ability

 

And once again some people keep thinking this thread is about the obsidian armor and its not

I guess telling folks to read the content of the post is just pointless

[Jedrik.3109]

Fun is subjective. 

End thread.

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, Jedrik.3109 said:

Fun is subjective. 

End thread.

While true, it's pretty much irrelevant, as i am 100% sure fun wasn't even considered by Anet as factor as far as Astral Ward set acquisition (and SotO legendary armor acquisition in general) is concerned.

[vares.8457]

20 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

While true, it's pretty much irrelevant, as i am 100% sure fun wasn't even considered by Anet as factor as far as Astral Ward set acquisition (and SotO legendary armor acquisition in general) is concerned.

How can you be 100% (!) sure? Do you have any source for your claim? How do you know what Anet considered and what not? 

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, vares.8457 said:

How can you be 100% (!) sure? Do you have any source for your claim? How do you know what Anet considered and what not? 

Okay. 99.9% sure. That 0.1% is the probability they did consider it, and discarded the idea as irrelevant.

[vares.8457]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Okay. 99.9% sure. That 0.1% is the probability they did consider it, and discarded the idea as irrelevant.

So you got no source and it is just your personal opinion presented as fact, that’s what I thought. 
I know we live in the era of fake news and alternative facts, why bother with evidence and true facts, right?

You simply don’t know what Anet considered and what not. 

Edited September 29, 2023 by vares.8457

[Futa.4375]

They quite clearly didn't care about making it fun, the whole thing is uninspired, braindead and unfun. And they know it and thought it was ok to release it as is.
No need for "fact checking" or anything, just a little bit of lucidity.

[vares.8457]

57 minutes ago, Futa.4375 said:

the whole thing is uninspired, braindead and unfun.

It’s the open world legendary armor, everything in open world is boring and braindead and there is not one challenging event in open world. The DE meta is an exception but many open world players cried and complained about it for months. Many open world players don’t want a challenge, they want events where they just have to do auto attack, the average open world casual isn’t capable of doing more. 
 

Edited September 30, 2023 by vares.8457

[Sobx.1758]

23 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

While true, it's pretty much irrelevant, as i am 100% sure fun wasn't even considered by Anet as factor as far as Astral Ward set acquisition (and SotO legendary armor acquisition in general) is concerned.

Then I guess OP needs to make a new point that will be "relevant"?

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

It is an armor set that works with all armor categories. There is a reason they made it a bit grindy to unlock.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 9/30/2023 at 7:39 PM, vares.8457 said:

It’s the open world legendary armor, everything in open world is boring and braindead and there is not one challenging event in open world. The DE meta is an exception but many open world players cried and complained about it for months. Many open world players don’t want a challenge, they want events where they just have to do auto attack, the average open world casual isn’t capable of doing more. 
 

One of the problems with DE is that it can still depend a lot on RNG on the number of swaps. Maps full of dedicated players will still get through, but it's pretty frustrating when you fail at 1% and you know the main reason you didn't get there is an above-average number of swaps.